THE years 2010 to 2014 will be of key importance in political history because that is when the existing parliamentary system will be given its last chance by the British public. All the evidence suggests the burden of reasserting its credibility will fall upon a Conservative Government led by David Cameron.
That is a frightening thought because the Tory Party at present, despite its poll lead, is in the doldrums, deracinated ideologically and culturally. At the last Conservative conference, Cameron delivered a speech that would not have disgraced Disrae
li: a golden nugget gleaming amid the dross of his usual utterances. Alas, it proved a false dawn. Since then, it has been business as usual for Dave.
From the beginning of his leadership, under the fatal tutelage of Francis Maude and other carriers of the lethal virus Portillista modernensis, Dave set out to alienate his core support. The "heir of Blair" brand, Oliver Letwin's embrace of wealth redistribution, Boy George ruling out tax cuts in favour of "stability", the attack on grammar schools by Etonian Dave in May 2007: none of that has been forgotten.
Cameron's denunciation of Margaret Thatcher and shadow Cabinet Office minister Greg Clark's exhorting Tories to ditch Churchill as a role model in favour of Polly Toynbee persuaded Conservative voters that the lunatics had taken over the asylum. A longstanding poll lead conferred on Dave by the desperate unpopularity of Gordon Brown, teamed with a serious recession, has created an expectation of Tory victory in 2010. If so, it will be victory by default.
Belatedly, the Tories have begun to enunciate policies. As the recession dawned, they offered a two-year council tax freeze, a six-month VAT holiday for small and medium-sized businesses and a 1% National Insurance cut for six months for firms with fewer than five employees. Whew! Seismic, or what? This was followed by a pledge to freeze the BBC licence fee at its present rate of £139.50 until 2010, though no pledge could be given beyond that date. Since there is no conceivable prospect of a Tory Government within that time frame, this wimpish proposal was an insult to the public's intelligence.
Last week Dave recognised that this kind of fiscal petit-point embroidery was not going to cut it with the electorate, so he went nuclear. In a speech he declared: "Put simply, our overriding objective will need to change from sharing the proceeds of growth to paying down our debt." So, apart from the existing pledge on inheritance tax and possible fine-tuning for lower-income earners, tax cuts are off the agenda.
There you have it: no Tory tax cuts in days of plenty and now none to galvanise the economy in recession. Forget Polly Toynbee - these comedians are students of Brezhnev. The irony of it all, sufficient to make a thinking Tory weep, is that the one silver lining to the economic depression is the unique opportunity it offers for a radical remodelling of the economy. Now is the time when the pointy-heads in the party should be proposing a Flat Tax, melting down the unaffordable public sector to the tune of £50bn and selling off the squalid BBC to whatever porn channel is sufficiently lacking in self-respect to buy it.
Instead, we had Dave in the Spectator last Wednesday wittering on about "the post-bureaucratic age", described in an understated tone as "this idea so big, so bold and so wide in its scope". Good, Dave, by all means cut away bureaucracy and devolve power directly to the citizenry; but it all seems a trifle vague. The problem is that the Tories have lost their ideological core: this party is shaped like a Polo mint.
Sometimes, when fiscal and economic policies fail, a political party can still survive through its moral and cultural compact with the electorate. Dave and his modernisers have trashed that long ago. In an English context, for example, do they seriously expect Catholic Tories to vote for them after they actively supported the militantly anti-Christian legislation that forced the closure of Catholic adoption agencies that could not, in conscience, be complicit in homosexual adoption?
That is not a rhetorical, but a practical, question. Many more could be asked regarding the Conservative Party's repudiation of the Judaeo-Christian ethic and its increasing alienation from and of those who espouse traditional values. This will not trouble the Cameron supporters, since they are more than likely to win the next general election. That is when the problems will arise, when a frantic nation discovers it has elected Blue Labour and that, since nothing has changed under the present political system – including any referendum on the Lisbon Treaty – the only recourse may be to abolish the status quo.
